Hi Lou.
I`m glad that u liked my choices.
But u don`t have to thank me for L`enfant.
Cause i`m huge fan of Dardenne Brothers.
There are no many directors in the world that can deliver with their films, such emotion in the most raw, unconventional and real way.
Not to mention their technique, with the hand-held camera, the minimalistic and wisely economical direction, that puts us insight the characters lives, rather than just watching them.
And they do all that, always, without judging their characters and with no intention of giving easy answers or solutions.
I think i`ve said enough.
Oh, and Rosetta is one of my favorite European films of the 90`s.
Nas : You've given a great description of the kind of films the two brothers make... the way their work... I discovered them (and Jeremie Renier in the same time) in "La promesse" and have seen "Rosetta" and this last one too, "L'enfant" which is my favourite in fact. The one that moved me the most in their work... (though - to be honest - I was not a great fan of "camera on the shoulder" cinema before... but I'm an old fashioned-girl that needs time to learn !)
They have also co-produced an excellent french film in 2005, directed by Costa Gavras, called "Le couperet" , a sort of social thriller...
I'm very happy that our "little" cinema is known and appreciated more and more outside Belgium and France. We have a lot of creative artists here, not enough means for sure, but we're persevering :)
I am disappointed that Johnny Depp's performance in The Libertine was not eligible, or if it was he was not nominated. It definitely has to be Depp's best performance but a controversial films I guess! The film has had a very strange release but see it if you can find it.
Hi ...shynney The Libertine only lasted 1 week here which was strange I so wanted to see is it on dvd yet I wonder? as for the Oscars this year I havent seen any of the nominations:( but hear Joaquin's performance is great this time last year we were all looking fwd to leo winning for The Aviator
Libertine!!!
I am disappointed that Johnny Depp's performance in The Libertine was not eligible, or if it was he was not nominated. It definitely has to be Depp's best performance but a controversial films I guess! The film has had a very strange release but see it if you can find it.
Shynney...
This is COSMIC!
I was just going to send you an email tonight about this!
I saw the trailer for Libertine last night on TV!!!
It opens here on March 10!
I'm definitely going the week it opens.
I just don't know yet if I can go on the first day.
But I can't wait.
I'll be keeping an eye out for ALL of the scenes you're in!
The trailer looks AMAZING!
I really like Depp so much better in these kinds of roles...
ya know, instead of the Willie Wonka kinda stuff.
Oscar choices & Libertine
8) I always like to read about Oscar choices.
So thanks for sharing yours here, Nas.
You have a few on your list that I’m not familiar with so I’ll try to rent them.
Shynney.....I’m off to see Libertine also, probably next weekend.
I agree with virgo.....the TV ads for it are very good and really peak my interest about the movie.
I love movies set in that time period.
It will be great to Depp on the big screen, but John Malkovich has always been one of my favorite actors.
And of course I’m mainly watching for 2 very special extras!
Hope I don’t start screaming when I see you or Dennis on the big screen!
Any tips no where and when to look for you?
8) There’s a Libertine trailer here, if anyone else wants to tke a sneak peak ~
(have you seen this trailer, Shynney?)
http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelibertine/
Thanks Skydog for the link to the trailer. I do hope you enjoy the film. Be prepared for an intense film experience. Malkovich was wonderful too in it. Doubt whether you will recognize us in the theatre audience scene, it was a blink of an eye and we were heavily disguised LOL
Belena interesting to hear it only ran for a week in Dublin. I finally tracked it down to a small town in the midlands where it ran for slightly over a week. Don't quite understand the reasoning behind its limited release but someone must have the answer I guess. Too bad it missed being considered for the oscars, at least Johnny's performance and Samantha Morton who was terrific too. Can vouch they both put a lot of effort into their performances!:D
Oscars circa 2006
Just my opinion, but Crash is very over-rated. The acting ensemble is wonderful but as far as the storyline and the direction - doesn't do it for me - its already been done recently before, better and with less stereotyping.
The one person I'll be rooting for is Terence Howard for Hustle & Flow. He just jumps off the screen in that performance.
Nas, agree with you in the animation feature - great stuff.
lastly, though she's good at it, I thought Amy Adams character in Junebug could have been the twin sister to the character she played in CMIYC - ditzy sweet enthusiastic needy. Celia Watson was wonderful in the movie but I guess older unattractive (relatively) actresses rarely get noticed for awards - you have to be beautiful like Charlize playing unattractive.
Saw "Brokeback Mountain" this afternoon and I will give it my "heart award" (how do you say that in english? No matter)... at least, yes, Nas... Ang Lee's directing is to celebrate and also the cinematographer... and the fabulous landscape, which has a supporting but so wonderful role in the movie. I can't give an award to Jake or Heath, they both were fantastic and touching. I brought them home...
I love when cinema do that on me...
"Red and blue states bash and boost 2005's best picture nominations"
By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies
You wouldn't know it these days, what with all the kerfuffle about this year's "controversial" nominations, but Oscar really is a very old-fashioned and conservative kind of guy. It's not as if Academy voters are wild-eyed radicals or elderly anarchists looking to advance agendas anathema to the Heartland.
Despite red state paranoia, what turns Oscar on -- bottom-line -- is almost always money, not politics. Box-office clout -- and sometimes verging-on-maudlin sentimentality -- has traditionally carried far more weight among Academy oldsters than cutting-edge socio-political content or avant-garde art.
Hollywood talent can afford to be PC to the max, but most of the money gravitates to old-school business values. A big-bucks industry like the Dream Factory is not about to go gaga over product that won't sell in the flyover states.
Still, during the past decade, some Academy Award nominations -- if not always wins -- have gone to what many right-wing types would consider hot-button movies. Strangely, they rarely elicited the kind of brouhaha brought on by 2005 noms such as "Brokeback Mountain" and "Munich."
In 1996, "The People vs. Larry Flynt" (Director, Actor noms) humanized "Hustler" magazine's unregenerate pornographer, making him a poster boy for the First Amendment (the wheelchair helped -- the Academy favors movies about the physically challenged).
In 1997, "Boogie Nights" again made the world of porn a fit subject for the mainstream screen, with Burt Reynolds (playing a dirty-movie director) and Julianne Moore (playing his porn-star wife) tapped for Best Supporting Actor/Actress noms in addition to its Best Screenplay nom. That same year, Kim Basinger took home the Best Supporting Actress award for her portrayal of a high-class Hollywood prostitute in "L.A. Confidential." (Oscar's penchant for fallen women is known as the "Butterfield 8" syndrome.)
On the gay front, "Gods and Monsters" (1998) garnered a Best Actor nod for a pre-Gandalf Ian McKellen, playing "Bride of Frankenstein" director James Whale, haplessly in love with his hunky gardener (Brendan Fraser). "American Beauty" (which nearly swept the top awards in 1999) featured an abusive father (Chris Cooper) whose extreme homophobia masked an "unnatural" lust for his next-door neighbor (Best Actor Kevin Spacey).
That same year, Hilary Swank won her first Oscar for her "Boys Don't Cry" (1999) performance as a doomed girl with the heart and soul of a gallant boy. Four years before tall, dark and handsome King Kong, Naomi Watts gave her love to Laura Harring in David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." (Director nom, 2002). And in 2003, Oscar went happily home with Charlize Theron when she shed her constricting beauty to play a lesbian man-killer in "Monster."
In 2004, the year that "Hotel Rwanda" (Actor, Supporting Actress, Screenplay noms) opened our eyes to the horror of genocide and "Vera Drake" (Actress, Director, Screenplay noms) introduced an abortionist who looked like anyone's mum, it took Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" to generate a mini-firestorm of unexpected controversy, among conservatives and liberals alike.
What was it in the film's Hemingway-esque boxing tale that ticked off right-wingers as well as champions of the physically challenged? Euthanasia. That "fightin' word" threatened to eclipse the living, breathing film, which nonetheless copped Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor awards.
This year's "Million Dollar Baby" is "Brokeback Mountain" -- Ang Lee's Western "Wuthering Heights" that the liberal media and critics organizations are using as an excuse to "shove the gay agenda down the public's throat" (the figure of speech anti-"Brokebackers" keep using). Or at least that's the way a lot of conservative critics are reading it.
"Brokeback" and fellow Best Picture nominees "Munich," "Capote," "Crash," and "Good Night, and Good Luck." certainly can't claim to be blockbusters, and they're mostly a mixed breed -- a little bit Hollywood, a little bit indie. What four out of five of these films share is superb storytelling, mostly top-notch visual artistry and characters who enlarge our grasp of what it means to be human.
But, in our polarized times, movies are treated less like art and/or entertainment than red state/blue state Rorschach -*test*-('")s for a schizophrenic nation, an America so deeply divided in its values and beliefs that every film fiction is bound to offend someone.
So whereas most liberals have found little to complain about in Oscar's choices, this year's provocative contenders leave a good many Americans cold -- or worse yet, hot under the collar. Let's put on our red- or blue-colored shades for a closer look at the 2005 Best Picture 2005 nominees.
'BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN' AND 'CAPOTE'
Lefty reviewers tout "Brokeback Mountain" as a cultural breakthrough: frank gay love featured in a mainstream movie, starring A-list actors. Others see the film first and foremost as a great American love story, full of authentic tenderness and pain.
Ironically, Annie Proulx's spare short story reminded some of fiction favored by Victorian novelists: in an age of extreme sexual repression, they wrote of mismatched lovers who are prevented -- by class or social stigma -- from having a life together, but remain wedded emotionally and spiritually.
Critics of many stripes praised the way director Ang Lee gave tragic resonance to the film's star-crossed lovers by evoking trace memories of classic Westerns and by contrasting the promise of the West's wide-open spaces with the constricting roles his modern-day cowboys are forced to play.
Conservative reviewers concede that "Brokeback" is artfully made, but argue that that just makes its "abhorrent" content -- read "homosexual propaganda" -- all the more dangerous and seductive. It's so dangerous, in fact, that an industry insider reports the rumor that some Academy voters aren't screening the film, presumably for fear of contagion.
Larry McMurtry, longtime chronicler of the West with all its warts, has been labeled "traitor" for adapting Proulx's short story for the screen. His co-writer Diana Ossana has said that even friends and fellow scribblers had reservations about the movie's homosexual text.
Steven D. Greydanus, film reviewer for the online Decent Films Guide, argues that "Brokeback" is a flat-out indictment of masculinity. And, he declares, it "may be the most profoundly anti-Western ever made, not only post-modern and post-heroic, but post-Christian and post-human." You'd have to say that all those "posts" pretty much cover the ground -- though watching the actual movie, it's hard to keep abstract theory in mind, what with all that distracting truth and beauty.
Conservative talk-show host Michael Medved advises taking a big dose of "March of the Penguins" (Best Documentary Feature nom) to ward off infection from "Brokeback"'s abhorrent agenda: homosexuality, adultery and bad parenting. In Medved's deeply Disneyized notion of nature, the adorable emperor penguins live out all the values Lee's cowboys flout.
Even monkey love can be prophylactic in the battle against "Brokeback"'s anti-values: "King Kong"'s characters "exemplify feminine virtue, masculine heroism and romantic love," trumpets Don Feder, compiler of "The 10 Best Conservative Movies of 2005." "Heroic" animals and "romantic" interspecies love affairs may be heaven sent, but when a couple of lonely humans hook up, all hell breaks loose.
Fittingly, in this year of the gay agenda, "Brokeback"'s Heath Ledger is up against Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote" in a very close con-*test*-('") for Best Actor. Shouldn't Truman's calculated conning of star-struck Kansans (especially susceptible women) cause red state critics to bridle? Where's the right-wing outrage at Capote as a self-admitted monster, as sociopathic as the cold-blooded killer he's half in love with and using as fodder for his best-seller?
Interestingly, conservative ire is reserved for "Capote" screenwriter Dan Futterman (Best Screenplay nom), criticized for his subliminal antideath penalty "message." The "true monsters," pundits explain, are the two murderers, not the man who writes about them.
Perhaps the novelist escapes conservative censure because he disguises himself -- in the Heartland -- as a domesticated homosexual, the gay equivalent of the neutered black man in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Still, Capote's a fair-haired, golden-tongued rogue only by virtue of brittle talent and style -- otherwise he, too, might have murdered to make a name for himself. Come to think of it, that's exactly what he does.
Next: "Crash," Munich" and "Good Night..." -------->
'CRASH'
A bleeding-heart liberal's dream movie, "Crash" delivers a heavy-handed message about race relations with all the subtlety of a head-on collision. Hard to fault the good heart and great cast on display in Paul Haggis' directorial debut; far more difficult to ignore the film's dim wits.
Though lefty critics gush over "Crash" for illuminating L.A.'s multiracial mash-up, the film's story is too schematic to allow messy flesh-and-blood reality much play. Easy to swallow, the film encourages viewers to go away feeling smug and enlightened when, in fact, we've been soothed by a superficial parable about America's volatile, complicated issues of race and ethnicity.
Even New York Times film critic AO Scott couldn't entirely buy into the movie's knee-jerk sermonizing. He backhanded Haggis' amateurish effort to "complexify" his designated racial reps -- blacks, whites, Hispanics and Persians -- by noting that they all had been given exactly "two sides."
"Crash" is the kind of "agenda" movie that makes its blatantly obvious points by aiming figurative neon arrows at emblematic characters, events and plot twists. See, here's a racist cop groping and humiliating a lovely upper-class black woman. Look, now he's saving her from a fiery car crash. Get it? When it's a matter of life and death, skin color doesn't matter. Now join hands for the "Can't we all just get along?" boogie.
Deep down, "Crash" believes that a change of heart could cure the world's ills -- and that always speaks to Oscar's sentimental side. Haggis's old-fashioned liberalism -- reminiscent of Stanley Kramer ("The Defiant Ones") -- is blandly unobjectionable, unlike the subtle and challenging humanism of, say, "Munich."
'MUNICH'
In contrast to "Crash," "Munich" sees deeply into the heart of darkness and wonders if it doesn't live in all of us.
Right and Left Coasters stood poised to celebrate the la-*test*-('") "Schindler's List"-type outing from Steven Spielberg. But they went all disoriented and twitchy when "Munich" delivered complex, unsettling art instead of the comfort food of black-and-white sermonizing.
To neo-cons, "Munich" just looks like equivocating in the face of terrorism. To liberals, it appeared Spielberg hadn't taken the right side -- indeed, didn't seem to have taken sides at all. Horrors! Moral ambiguity! "Munich" is bigger than any political here and now: it's about the way human beings are corrupted by hatred and violence, anytime, anywhere.
Along with David Cronenberg's deeply subversive, mostly Oscar-ignored "A History of Violence," "Munich" wonders whether, once you've let the beast out of the bag, can you ever go home again? Liberal thinkers can't believe the beast lives inside us -- it's all a matter of education and economics -- while red state analysts are sure that only Strong Government and a conservative Supreme Court can hold Original Sin in check.
'GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.'
In George Clooney's companion piece to "Syriana," Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn, Best Actor nom) turns TV's unforgiving white light on one of America's most poisonous guardians of virtue, exercising the power of a news medium not yet devolved into entertaining pap, corporate-sponsored bread and circuses.
Of course, the movie's crisis of conscience can be comfortably written off as some quaint anachronism. It's a little dust-up back in the day before the news mutated into entertainment delivered by sexpot anchors and our "fair and balanced" breed of bloviating political commentators.
Naturally, lest liberals go all simple-minded with admiration for one of the few newsmen who spoke up against Sen. Joseph McCarthy's political witch hunt, a host of revisionist naysayers have crawled out of the woodwork to nibble Murrow's heroism down to less-than-noble size.
Strangely, conservative critics haven't really ganged up on Clooney. Strange, however, because his "Good Night" deals with the destructive fallout of extremism in service of national security -- a controversial subject not unfamiliar to Americans in the post-Sept. 11 era.
But for blue state glory and red state pillorying, this is the year of "Brokeback Mountain." For Heartland conservatives, Lee's "gay agenda" movie trumps Haggis' liberal fable about race relations, Spielberg's diagnosis of violence and vengeance as a metastasizing cancer and Clooney's visually impeccable meditation on old-fashioned courage. For many blue staters, "Crash" looks like the simplistic antidote to disquieting movies that beg more questions than they answer.
All of this Best Picture controversy will be, of course, red meat for big time comedy carnivore Jon Stewart, who is tapped to host Oscar's blowout this year. Will Mr. Stewart's satirical spine go all soft and gooey when he faces a live audience famously more square than hip -- not to mention America's red- and blue-spangled gaze? Or will he heal our divided state with bracing comic medicine? Stay tuned for your moment of Zen."
Kathleen Murphy, well said...
Unfortunately the weakest film of the 5, won the biggest award.
Well, it`s not the first and won`t be the last time for the Academy.
Jon Stewart was great as always...
Not as sharp and outspoken as i expected, but i understand...
ABC isn`t Comedy Central and The Oscars isn`t The Daily Show...
So, considering, i think he left everyone satisfied...
And what diabolical mind decided to seat Jack"Sunglasses"Nickolson next to Keira"Cheekbones"Knightly?...
